


stop looking up for heaven (waiting to be buried)

by achillesheel



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Eventual Lexa & John Murphy Friendship, Gen, Time Travel, and isn’t that what time travel is all about?, if & doesnt mean friendship im gonna look like a real clown, im gonna stop now bc im already embarrassed by these tags, murphy is writing his own fix-it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-05-12
Packaged: 2021-02-23 01:13:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23869972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/achillesheel/pseuds/achillesheel
Summary: john murphy always knew that he would die for bellamy blake - and when he steps into the anomaly and gets sent back to a time before sanctum, he thinks he just might have.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/John Murphy, Lexa & John Murphy (The 100)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 32





	1. i’ll take my chances on the curb here with you

**Author's Note:**

> tw for the mention of guns, use of needles, mention of the whole “murphy dying” thing, there’s also a knife thrown in there too, for flavor.

In his heart, Murphy always knew that he would die by Bellamy’s side. Whether he liked it or not, Bellamy Blake would be his undoing. He knew it from the moment he saw him: _this man will be the death of me._

There was something ancient in his stance; carved out of stone, matted curls situated just so atop his head. Each line of his face was sharp and set, shoulders squared and hip jutted slightly out. Every inch of him bled power, and every one of his words held the weight of revolution. Murphy fell for those words, hook, line and sinker. He would watch cities burn for for those words, for the single promise that weighed down every glance - _I’ll watch your back._ It would only take four words for murphy to let the dirt run red for him, whether it was his own blood or anyone else’s. Those words meant so much more than having someone to check his blind spots. 

After all, he had Mbege for that. Mbege could help him find the unfindable, to see whatever sunsets he was colorblind to. But Mbege was like him: a desperate kid, longing for any sense of control he could find. Reeling in Murphy was his last resort, and Mbege’s illusion of security was Murphy‘s. 

But those four _damn_ words meant so much more when they rolled off of Bellamy’s tongue. That was safety, sure, but also freedom, and warmth that would make him forget how cold the world could be. (Warmth that he would have been surprised by, had Octavia not been ever-present). 

Bellamy told him to watch Finn’s back, as the high noon sun cast a bright light on the cuts and dried blood that adorned their faces. But, past all that, Bellamy looked directly into the ocean of Murphy’s eyes, just as he had done as the boy was strung up to die for someone else’s crime. That glance placed the world upon Murphy’s shoulders, and suddenly, he didn’t need the sun’s light to read Bellamy’s face. He would know that face if he were trapped six feet under in the dark brown of Bellamy’s eyes, or trapped in the tumultuous waves of his own. There’s guilt wrapped up in the set jaw that used to bleed power, a heavy sigh begging to be set free from the tension in his shoulders. There’s an apology there that Murphy assumed was meant for Finn - but Murphy would understand what he truly meant all too late.

In all honesty, Murphy couldn’t have cared less about Spacewalker or the princess, but Bellamy cared. _Watch his back_ Bellamy had told him, leaving the _like I should have watched yours_ left unsaid, and unheard by Murphy until countless sleepless nights later. 

-

Murphy supposes, as he sets the gun down, that this is a true test of that promise from so many years ago. Sanctum’s pink skies rested high above them, as if God had taken a backseat and let a child paint a portrait of how the life of John Murphy would end. 

He had handed the strings of his fate to that same child as he put the only thing that guaranteed his safety on the ground and walked towards death with his arms raised. He had splayed out his hands in a mock gesture of harmlessness, as if Bellamy needed to know that Murphy wouldn’t have shot him, gun in hand or not.

Because, even as the years passed by and two aged side-by-side, even as they had yelled and fought and abandoned each other, even as they made each other’s hands become more crimson than skin, one thing would never change: they would always crawl back to each other. Even John Murphy, survivor extraordinaire, who had been forced to stitch himself back together with his own shaky hands a few too many times, would always find Bellamy.

Bellamy Blake would be the death of him, but he didn’t quite care, in those moments. One day, they would die side by side, as the sun sets on both their lives and a world shrouded in smoke. But, regardless of what world they left behind, one thing was clear: Bellamy Blake was not a survivor’s move. 

But _fuck_ the survivor’s move. 

Every step towards Bellamy had sent his head reeling, but all thoughts of running and abandoning him - the man with all of plutus’ gold laced in his eyes and the strength of acchiles woven into his bones - were trumped by his heart. Bellamy would never be the survivor’s move, and Murphy was so close to accepting it.

And yet, when the same strength that murphy had trusted in the centuries-old elevator was holding his head under the water, _so close_ felt _so far_. He didn’t want bellamy blake to be the death of him, for his last memory of the man he trusted to be one of violence, rather than the warmth of bellamy’s arm around his shoulder, or the shine of his eyes as he waxes on about whatever topic is soaring above murphy’s head. He wanted a life with Bellamy, not a tragic end that would drive Bellamy far deeper than Murphy’s shallow grave.

  
  
And as the sting of fresh air - _not water,_ he rejoices - hits the back of his throat, he thinks he might have a chance. The devil could kiss his ass. He could run away, just as his desperation always wanted, yet with both Bellamy, Raven and Emori at his side, like his heart had always yearned for.   
  


And then, there’s Bellamy, asking him to explore the tunnels.  
  
And there’s Bellamy, smiling with him as they talk to Jordan.   
  
And there’s Bellamy, calling him a traitor.

And there’s Murphy, still willing to die by his side.  


And there’s murphy, standing with bellamy at the end of the world, sun setting as smoke rises in the distance. The primes have fallen - all except two.

He and Emori - well, Daniel and Kaylee Lee - have the world in their hands. Suddenly, the whole world is watching their backs, and Murphy hates the amount of eyes on him.

  
Daniel Lee, obviously, was a man of regal stature. He was well-read, with a firm handshake and the ability to make his smiles golden and his wink capable of melting the hearts of anybody nearby. Daniel also had a boyfriend (husband? fiancée? he can’t remember, and it’s kind of hard to when he has to keep up the act without knowing exactly who he’s playing) that murphy doesn’t quite know how to handle.  
  
  
But, the crowds that are ready to bow at his feet are enough of a distraction from his dreams of running away. He has capes and satin sheets that smell like something unplaceable yet sweet ( _it’s cinnamon, danny_ , zev had told him). He’s living in luxury that the gray walls of the ark could never house. His walls are lined with books upon books that he has no interest in reading, nor the ability to. Bellamy had told him about a book once ( _parting, such sweet sorrow_ ). Daniel Lee has probably read all of these books cover-to-cover. But John Murphy, cockroach, couldn’t. 

But Bellamy could. Bellamy wasn’t exactly _allowed_ in his room, but he’s the new leader of Sanctum, so who gives a shit about what’s allowed and what’s not? 

The man sneaks in through the window, clumsily half-tripping as his foot snags on the carpet, audibly slamming the other one down to regain his balance. Murphy laughs at the look of pure panic that adorns his face. Bellamy’s eyes rest on something at the opposite end of the room, his expression immediately shifting to one of excited curiosity. Having him here - with an atmosphere so _light_ that one would wonder where it came from, considering the circumstances - brings a small smile to his face. It’s a simple pleasure, unlike the book that bellamy takes off the shelves, which looks like the exact _opposite_ of simple.

  
“The Orestia? How did they even _find_ this?” 

“They were rich, Bellamy.”

  
  
“How do you know that?”

  
  
“How do i-?” Murphy paused, realizing that Bellamy was messing with him as his eyes fell upon the crocodile grin that was tattooed on his face.

It was nice to see bellamy smiling. It distracted Murphy from the crescent moons stamped under the man’s eyes. But, the shadows underneath his eyes were nothing compared to the tempest in his soul, which was nearly impossible to look past. Octavia had been lost - no, Bellamy wouldn’t like it if he ever said that out loud, it made it sound like she was dead - Octavia had been trapped by the anomaly for three weeks, and those three weeks had aged Bellamy three years. 

Murphy was ready to stop time, to keep bellamy’s raven hair from going grey.

  
  
-  
  


And, as he looks into the green blur of the anomaly that stands before him, Murphy supposes he’s about to do just that. There’s a smirk on his face, and a “here we go again” on his tongue. Maybe today was the day he died for Bellamy Blake: the idiot who ran into the anomaly after realizing they needed a man on the inside. Murphy is simply following Bellamy into the fire, all in the name of watching his back. He breathes in one last breath of Sanctum; every unfamiliar, miraculous inch of it, and steps into the anomaly.

-

For a moment, he thinks he’s dying. Again. The whole “life flashing before your eyes” thing hadn’t seemed real before. It sounded like a playground myth, especially when he had seen nothing but darkness as his breathing petered out while he laid on the ground of Sanctum.   
  
But now, as he laid on ground that was distinctly _not Sanctum_ , remembering the images of every moment of his life blazed in the green tempest of the anomaly, he couldn’t help but think that was more true than he had ever known. Murphy took in a breath of Not Sanctum, as if that would cleanse his mind of every memory he had worked so hard to erase.  
  
He recognized this place, as he let that breath fill every inch of his body. Sanctum had felt like a brave new world, every inch as dangerous as it was foreign. _We’re pioneers_ , Bellamy had said, but Murphy had never truly felt like one; at least, not on sanctum.  
  
But on Earth, he felt like he could have ripped the world apart and built it up again with streets paved with the gold of every treasure he would find. Earth tasted like freedom, like a fresh start. Earth was a storm, and Murphy could have lived in it’s rain forever if he wanted to.  
  
Well, not _literally_ , which made the rain that had begun to fall down on him very, _very_ annoying. He pushed himself up, only to realize that everything _ached_. Pain shot up his leg, and he looked down at his knee, letting a quick “shit” slip off his tongue at the bandage around it. He took a moment to survey his hands: something akin to the ghost of rope burn lined his palms, and dirt lined his fingers. A few feet from him lay a gun, and, as he looks past the scratched black barrel of it, he finally lays eyes on it - well, _him_.  
  
_Spacewalker_.   
  
Murphy’s face drops, mind reeling between two realities. He remembered Clarke’s crimson-stained hand pulling away his body as it slumped forward. He remembered stepping forward to meet Raven’s gun as Spacewalker walked towards death with his arms raised. And yet, there he was, sleeping soundly, as if he wasn’t about to use the gun that laid only feet away to build his own coffin with the bodies of innocents. 

  
He pulls himself away from that thought with an internal, _hey, can you kids lighten up back there?_ as he looks at the area around him, frantically searching for the only ace up his sleeve. His first and only souvenir from Sanctum was lying somewhere in the darkness. It was his only piece of wiggle-room, and he needed every inch of it.  
  
He stood from his position against the ground, wondering if the anomaly could have cast it farther away. He took the flashlight, his feet taking him to the area surrounding the pair’s makeshift camp for the night. His steps grew more frantic as he continued, until the very thought of not having his only sense of security running through his veins was enough to put a vice around his chest.  
  
The absence of it sent his heart racing, until he found it: a small syringe, with it’s contents as dark as the world around him. Nightblood, ready for the taking.   
  
Admittedly, Murphy hadn’t known where he would end up, or how irradiated it would be, or how red or black his blood would run. He thought, as macabre as it sounds, that it would be pretty anti-climatic if he died of radiation poisoning the moment he landed wherever (or whenever) the anomaly spat him out. But, even if he was on earth, he didn’t want this golden opportunity to slip through his fingers.   
  
He took the syringe, placing it on the inside of his elbow before injecting it, just as the doctor on Sanctum had done before he donned a cape and a suit, ready to have the whole world in the palm of his hand. It was a long forgotten feeling, washed away by the dirt on his hands what would be the last specs of his own crimson blood from his skin. His blood would run black. He’d be royal, even in the eyes of the grounders.  
  
Well, all except one, apparently.

The sudden kick to the back pushed his battered knees to the slightly damp ground, but Murphy’s cry of pain did nothing to stop the attack. The cool press of a blade to his neck made him wish he had the gun with him, to give him a sense of safety as he lived through the complex story of his survival.  
  
“What are you doing in these woods?” A woman - _not just any woman_ \- said. An unsettlingly out of place smile sprouted across Murphy’s lips. _Of_ fucking _course it’s her_.  
  
Lexa kom Trikru, Heda, literally the last person he wants to see right now, had a knife to his throat.

“This ought to be fun.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and that’s the start of this unplanned mess! this is my first fic and i am s t r e s s e d about it. i ran this thing through so many grammar checkers so here’s to hoping that not having an actual /person/ read this doesn’t come back to bite me. i apparently do not understand grammar at all which is kinda sad but. whatever. 
> 
> if you couldn’t already tell, i have no idea where the heck this is going to go. it’s going Somewhere i just have no idea which way that is. okay? okay. there are going to be multiple chapters (even tho i can’t change that it says “1/1” sorry for the clickbait there).
> 
> and finally, this is.... w a y darker than i thought it would get. which is a testament to the future tone but seriously that got kinda sad at certain points so... sorry? 
> 
> and there is. almost no mention of lexa until the end so im sorry. every chapter after this won’t be so bellamy and murphy centric i promise. BUT this will be, at it’s core, a Lexa And Murphy Save Bellamy And Change The Past While Bellamy Sorts Out His Shit And Gets To Be A Nerd For A Couple Minutes story bc it’s my fic and i get to put my three emotional support characters into a trio and have them go on wacky adventures together.


	2. words are all we have

Lexa was dead, Finn was dead, and so was Earth. It felt odd to mourn something (or someone) that was not yet dead. It felt even odder to mourn a person who was holding a knife to his throat. She was a ghost, but a ghost so real that he could feel the warmth radiating from her knee as she presses it against his back.

With every second that passes, the cool tip of the knife grows closer, and he can almost feel it dancing across every inch of his skin. They stay there in silence, for a moment, locked in a match to see how far the other is willing to go. Murphy breaks first, prophecy putting more pressure against him than Lexa ever could.

“I’m looking for Clarke,” he says, any attempt to conceal his nervousness in vain. “Another one of my people, Finn - he’s here with me.” The words come out jumbled, too fast for the weight of a death sentence to be held on his last words. 

“How am I supposed to trust that you’re not staging an attack?” 

He wants to spill his guts, to brand all of the tragedies and triumphs of Earth on her mind, but he’s just John Murphy. He’s Prisoner 287, simply crawling through the dirt for anything he can get. He’s a cockroach, a thief, a criminal, a killer. 

In that moment, he remembers Bellamy, practically singing as he reads page after page of the Orestia. (It had become a staple of their nights together, as Murphy could only see words on a page, rather than how Bellamy saw every temple and every drop of blood that the poets had imagined. Bellamy saw life where he only saw ink, and tragedy where he only saw bent pages.) Murphy remembers that same voice that held the weight of revolution turning grim as he described the plight of Cassandra. He remembers simply thinking “ _ wow, Apollo is a dick _ ”. Now, he sees the true extent of her torture. 

He  _ couldn’t  _ tell the truth. Any sane man would simply pass him by as he grasps at straws to save a world that can’t be saved. His words were useless - well, not quite. 

“I would have a weapon if we were doing that, wouldn’t I?” The words come out smoother, now. He’s nearly perfected the slow slip into letting his mouth work its magic. 

On the Ark, he could never quite do it. His temper had always gotten in the way, leaving his fists worn and red by the time a conversation was done. He hadn’t even quite taught himself on Earth; the planet had done the teaching for him. The crimson that ran across his clothes had blended together, leaving nothing but his tongue left untouched. His words were all he had left, and Earth had taught him to let the crimson drip gold from his tongue. Every syllable held a hum, like a string vibrating as a bow rubs against it.

Earth taught him to take what he had and make some kind of leverage out of it. All he had to do was live to see the next day, so he can pick up the pieces of himself and do it all again. 

Lexa responds after a moment with the Holy Grail of material: “How far are you willing to go for this girl?” 

And there it is: the jackpot. Earth had given him scraps and his own two hands to work with. He had been forced eat the world raw and choke down the trauma to make it to tomorrow far too many times, and now he had been given a feast to swallow and savor. 

“Honestly?” He starts, drawing his words out in apathy that’s all too familiar on his tongue. “I couldn’t care less.” It’s a half-truth, considering that he  _ does  _ care about Clarke, but he understands that this is a mission that wouldn’t have meant anything anyways. “But Finn?” He pauses for a moment, and Lexa seems to believe the casual facade as he almost sarcastically draws out the statement. But Murphy has the weight of the world on his shoulders, hoping he doesn’t simply move up Finn’s execution date. “He’d tear the world apart to find her.” 

“And what says he won’t?” 

“I’d shoot him in leg if he tried.” A blatant lie, considering his refusal to do so before. He had wanted a place to call home, and he had been on thin ice already. It was selfish of him, and he knows that now, but that doesn’t mean he would do it again. 

“Lair.” 

_Well, shit._ Guess he’s not as a good of a lair as he thought. 

Murphy opened his mouth to speak again, but the sound of footsteps in the distance cut off his train of thought. Judging by the fact that the knife was still against his throat, Lexa was expecting them. 

“Who’s this?” The mysterious man asks as he loops around the commander, kneeling before him. Murphy pulls his chin up ever-so-slightly in defiance, ignoring the way the knife nearly cuts him as he shifts. 

“Skaikru.” She glances at him, eyes resting on the back of his head for only a moment or two. Murphy can feel the gaze burning through his skull nonetheless. “And your new ward.” 

Murphy and the man can only give a simultaneous  “ _what_ ”  in response. 

“If this  Finn tries anything to harm my people,” she leans in, voice dropping in volume only slightly, “kill him.” 

Murphy sputters at that, immediately opening his mouth to protest. He needs to find Bellamy, and he can’t do that if he’s being executed for killing Spacewalker. Lexa ignores him, adding the icing on the cake: 

“Kill him, or I kill you.” The man - who Murphy had decided to call Santa, as his beard stretched down beyond his collarbone - said simply, his eyes stone cold. The commander didn’t seem to have a problem with this, which Murphy was slightly offended by. Lexa gavethe man additional orders in Trigedasleng, which Murphy would have been able to translate, had he not been too busy spiraling. He could only pick up on a few words,  _protect_ b eing the only one that Murphy deemed important. 

Just as he let a curse slip past his lips, the knife was moved away from his throat and he was being wrestled up from his position on his knees, which is something the wound on his leg did not appreciate at all. Murphy led the man back to his camp, making aggressive and sarcastic conversation along the way. (If he’s going to be kidnapped and used as a backup plan, he might as well have some fun with it.)

Despite everything, Finn is still sleeping soundly. The man moves to the bushes, nestling down to a hiding spot in the darkness. The only way that Murphy knows that he’s still there is the ever-present feeling of being watched.

It’s creepy, to know that someone is watching him sleep, but he’s been through worse.

-

  
By the time that Clarke arrives at the village, Finn Collins is dead ( _he wouldn’t stop-_ ) , Bellamy and Octavia are nowhere to be found, and Murphy is on his knees.

He wonders how he somehow found his way back to where he started. He’s in the dirt, and Clarke’s eyes are burning into his soul, but he can’t stop looking into them. The last time he had looked into her eyes that long, she had told him she was proud of him.

He can’t even imagine her saying that now. He doesn’t blame her. 

No matter how much looking at Clarke hurt, looking at Finn would be even worse ( _he would have killed them-_ ) . The boy rested in an ever growing puddle of crimson, eyes pointed towards the sky. It would be an almost serene scene, if Finn wasn’t, well,  _dead_.

The guns were on the ground, and everything was still. Murphy would have cherished this moment, had it been under better circumstances. All he wanted was a moment of peace - not long enough for him to fall apart, but just long enough for him to live, if only for a single moment. But this wasn’t peaceful. He didn’t feel  _ alive _ at all. 

No, this wasn’t life. It was a poor copy of it, with all color except crimson stripped away. For a moment, he wants to hand the reins back to whatever child had decided to make the sky pink on the fateful day that John Murphy died, just to make the world colorful again. He would die a thousand times over to see color again. 

He would die a thousand times over to see Bellamy again. To see Emori again. To see Raven again. 

He would die a thousand times over to he breathing in Earth’s air for the first time, the sheer amount of  _green_ making him fall back. 

When they had first arrived on Earth, he had laid in the grass, eyes staring up into a sky covered by tree branches. In all his naive glory, he had thought that  this is what his father meant when he talked about what it meant to be alive. He had laid there, on his back, for what could have been minutes or hours, just thinking about that one word ; _life_.

But back in a world with no color except crimson, Murphy was lying on his back once again. But this time, there is no green, there is no Bellamy, or Emori, or Raven. This time, he isn’t on his back in awe. 

This time, he’s on his back after Monroe slams her foot into his face. 

For a single, sickening moment, he thought he had found Octavia. He thought that he had simply missed her and Bellamy in the shuffle. He thought that this would be a short venture and they could somehow get back to Sanctum, Octavia in tow. 

Instead, he opens his eyes to see nothing but dirt. He slowly turns onto his stomach, his back to her, and spits a mixture of blood and saliva into the ground. Monroe’s yelling fades to the background of his thoughts as he looks at it. His lips twitched between a smile and the frown that had been tattooed on his face for as long as Finn had been bleeding as he glanced at something as simple as his own blood.

His blood was black, as expected, but Monroe evidently hadn’t noticed. She moved to grab him by the collar, one hand already pulling at him, and Murphy braved himself for another punch - 

Which never came. He had closed his eyes when Monroe had grabbed him, not wanting to see another moment of this nightmare ( _I should have tried harder-_ ) . Now, his eyes were wide open. 

Santa stood between him and Monroe, stone cold and unmoving. Monroe tried to test the latter of the two, and failed when the man merely shoved her away. They all stood there in silence once again, all attention now on the grounder that had emerged from the woods. 

“This boy,” he paused, clearly not wanting to have anything to do with him, “is under the protection of the commander. He will stay at Polis until the commander says otherwise.” The man turned to Murphy at that, impatiently gesturing for him to stand. He scrambled upwards, eyes desperately averting the body of Finn ( _may we meet again-_ ) as he kept them trained on Santa’s back. Monroe had started yelling again, but most of it was drowned out by the ground rushing in Murphy’s ears. Only one sentence cut through the noise: 

“I’m coming with him.” 

That was Clarke, with both the honey and hive wrapped up in her voice. Her voice had only broken at the end, as her eyes trained on Murphy’s once again. There wasn’t hate in them, not yet. Clarke’s features were trained in an odd numbness, with the illusion only broken by the quick rise and fall of her chest and the way she blinked for seconds at a time. She was desperate not to cry, not to scream, not to let the whole world see her crumble. 

Murphy knows that look well. The steel walls of his room on the Ring know it better than he ever could. 

Murphy’s guard opens his mouth to protest, only for Clarke to cut him off before he even has the chance to speak. “The Commander will need one of my people to talk with after this. It’s better if I do it than him.” 

Santa, who had spent a five minute walk with the human chihuahua known as Murphy mere hours before, seems to agree to this. The man gestured for Murphy to get on a horse of his own, and for Clarke to get on the back of Santa’s horse. It felt so oddly casual, to simply mount a horse as the world’s color slowly slips away, and the thought of green (and life, and Bellamy and Emori and Raven and-) slipped away. 

He had no one to blame but himself for his world being stripped of green. 

Murphy took one last look at Clarke Griffin, and decided that he had stripped her world of green too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> first off, i know that it doesn’t /look/ like lexa and murphy are going to be friends but i promise they’re going to be friends 
> 
> second, santa is gustus. i could not remember the man’s name while writing this so i just called him santa, and i kept the name in there because i liked it. 
> 
> third, the quality drop is genuinely painful. i managed to proofread it, so there shouldn’t be any typos, unlike last time. i also managed to fix the spacing which was a pain in the ass before. even if it’s not as good as the last chapter, it’s been more than two weeks since i posted this, so here you go and i hope you liked it!


End file.
